Monday, February 27, 2012

How to tell . . .

. . . you might not be having the best agility weekend of your life:

You get up at 3 a.m. to go potty, look out the window and it’s snowing so hard you can’t see past the fence.

You scramble frantically to leave earlier than you had planned because the state patrol road report is saying Interstate 80 is “100% snow covered.” When you get there, it is totally clear. (This tends to skew my confidence in the state patrol’s powers of observation.)

When you pull into the paved parking lot at the trial site, it is full. You have to park in “the field.”

There are 3-4 inches of heavy wet snow in “the field.”

The van ahead of you gets stuck.

The car behind you gets stuck.

You get safely into a parking spot and immediately start worrying how in the world you're going to get out.

While tugging with your dog before your first run, he snap-rolls the leash and smashes your right hand into your left hand.

You look down at your right hand and realize a finger is bleeding. Because it smashed into your wedding ring and split the skin at the base of the fingernail. The timer says “GO!”

You release your dog and he immediately takes an off-course tunnel.

While standing in line for lunch, your friend gets the last bowl of potato soup. And the last Diet Coke. (Okay, Tammy, maybe we should eat lunch BEFORE 2 p.m. next time to prevent this from happening again.)

You have your dog totally psyched and focused, ready to go, and the dog who runs ahead of you demolishes half the course.

The dog crated next to you barks constantly. While his owner sits there and ignores it.

Your dog takes 27 off-course tunnels in one run.

You experiment with creative combinations of four-letter words aimed at the barking dog next to you when its owner walks away.

You get out of the parking lot without getting stuck but there were several yeeee-haaaaaw moments and now your vehicle is coated with mud from the roof down.

Halfway through Day Two of listening to your neighbor’s dog barking non-stop, you start entertaining fantasies about borrowing your husband’s cattle prod.

You can’t decide whether to use it on the dog first or the owner.

You finally get a great handling strategy to keep your dog out of off-course tunnels and he forgets how to stick his contacts, rendering your strategy useless as he blasts past you into the 58th off-course tunnel of the weekend.

10 comments:

I'd use the prod on the owner for allowing the dog to continue that behavior. At least your boy didn't start talking back to the neighbor's dog - you could have had dogs barking in stereo! (And picked up a bad habit to boot!)

All I can hear is Tracy yelling, "NO SOUP FOR YOU!!!!". Hey, it could have been worse!! You could have gotten lost on the straight line through the box!! LOL Of course, she still qualified! I wonder what that field looks like today? I hope the 'dog' has a sore throat!

I believe that we were at the same show! I don't remember you crating near me, so (thankfully) the barking dog was not us, I did not eat the potato soup, and I did not get stuck in the muck- so I feel safe that you won't hate me. But I DID get up at 3 am and wonder why I thought going to Iowa in February was a good idea... Did you run at the very top of the 24" dogs? I might have run close behind you.

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Welcome to Exercise Finished, a blog about life with dogs, obedience and agility training and trialing, living in an old farmhouse, gardening, camping, cooking, storm spotting and enjoying every step of the journey.